The invention relates to the control and/or access of objects, in particular objects known as beans. Beans, for example JavaBeans components (JavaBeans is a trademark of Sun Microsystems, Inc.), are reusable software components which can be manipulated visually in a builder tool (e.g. an editor or graphical user interface builder (GUI builder)). An example of a builder tool is the JavaBeans Development Kit. Further details about beans can be found in many different works, for example in a book entitled Mastering JavaBeans by Lawrence Vanhelsuwé published by Sybex (ISBN 0-7821-2097-0). This is just one example of many broadly equivalent books on the market having “JavaBeans” in the title and describing the JavaBeans. Many of these works, including the book Mastering JavaBeans, supply the Bean Development Kit mentioned above.
Beans vary in functionality, but they typically share certain common defining features providing a set of properties, a set of methods for performing actions, and support for events and for introspection, also known as reflection. The properties allow beans to be manipulated programmatically and support customization of the bean. The methods implement the properties. The support for events enables beans to fire events and define the events which can be fired. The support for introspection enables the properties, events and methods of the bean to be inspected from externally.
However, beans can generally only be controlled and manipulated within the virtual machine environment in which the beans exist. U.S. Pat. No. 5,315,703 and U.S. Pat. No. 5,367,633 describe object-based systems where change notification functions are provided. However, these patents describe stand-alone system.
It would be desirable to be able to access and control beans remotely, for example over a network. However, this is not been possible without actually including appropriate methods within the beans themselves to expose the methods required. However, it is not desirable to have to specifically adapt beans to permit remote access. It would be desirable to be able remotely to access, control and modify any beans remotely without pre-modification.
Accordingly it is an object of the invention to address this problem.